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Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Generation News- a guest post by Alex Fishman

Thanks to Alexander Fishman for contributing this post, which will also act as the primer for 5/17/17's #WeirdEd. I want to spend time talking about the craven sickness which has taken over our highest levels of government and I'm working on ways to tie those issues to education in organic ways that will allow for productive conversation. Alex spoke up on twitter with the idea for this post, and I have one or two of my own cooking. We can't ignore what's happening. I want to be clear that this space won't become a political screed, but I also refuse to turn a blind eye. There will be fun and foolishness, there will be lesson plans and classroom stories, but there's also the real world and it is really impinging on my state of mind and our education system. So I could write about homework and connected educators, but that's never been me. If teachers want to claim we're preparing kids for the real world then we need to be prepared to talk about the real world in real ways. Education is political. Education is resistance.

For a couple of months in the winter a young man would arrive early to school to sit in my lab and surf the web. Well, not really surf the web. He mostly just watched YouTube. Specifically he started each day watching various news clips. He watched both the real news and comedy news, like Jon Oliver. I compared this ritual to my morning of watching comedy news while I eat breakfast, or my wife’s ritual of listening to NPR while getting ready. We all have these morning rituals of getting ourselves in the know, or just getting our minds woken up. Have these changed with generations?

Lacking the capacity to run my own study, I’ve pulled up some done by research organizations. What they find is unsurprising in that we get our news from a bunch of different sources and we mistrust the lot of them.

What may be surprising is that television still reigns but of course the habits of consuming it and other sources vary from generation to generation. It has interesting implications for the classroom to think about the teacher and student arriving having consumed news on the same topic from highly divergent sources.

The woeful inadequacy in this system was in stark relief in the last couple of years as time after time, new media exposed the brutal state sanctioned violence against black youth. I don’t know if teachers arrived to schools having read and watched news of Ferguson and other flashpoints of police brutality through their TVs, while students saw the same through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Research into the perception of these events is needed. Many teachers are digging into the gulf between students and themselves, or between their mostly white colleagues and their students in some greatworks.

In the aftermath of the murder of Mike Brown I got permission to host circles of conversation in my technology classroom. I don’t know if this was the right thing to do. If it helped any of my students, mostly students of color, cope and reflect or if it soothed only myself and the other majority white teachers. As I reflect on those conversations a couple of years removed I’m thinking about what was at the center of the circle. Not literally. There was nothing, just the empty tile floor. But I wonder, did we - teacher and student - have a shared thing that we were talking about, or where we working on the assumption that we spoke about the same America, the same Ferguson, and yet in our minds imagined two different places, two or many more than two, different narratives of race, of violence, of the state and what it is or isn’t supposed to do to people’s bodies.

This week the DOJ has released a report detailing the systemic racism of the Baltimore police department. Yet something tells me that this report will not impact the elementary school curriculum around neighborhoods, police officers, or government. It will also not impact middle school history curriculum around civil rights era. It may perhaps find its way into high school classes that deal explicitly with social justice in history. But I wonder, with systemic oppression laid so completely bare, how can we continue to teach ‘law and order’ to our students in the same ways?

Governor Rauner in Illinois has beat me to the punch here, by mandating that schools teach youth how to submit to state power. How will teachers respond? The tired excuse that conversations on power, race, and politics don’t belong in elementary classrooms is a lie in light of this move to explicitly train our youth into oppression.

As teachers we are constantly chasing educational trends. From multiple intelligences to hyperdocs, teachers are looking for that edge. We attend conferences and webinars to find that cool new app, that next awesome thing, that insight to make us and our classes even better. We implore one another to teach like pirates, like explorers, like innovators, like engineers, like the latest and most expansive acronyms [see evolution of STEM to STEAM to STREAM]. But if we adventure in the service of the oppressive state as Rauner’s bill implores us to do, we aren’t pirates or adventurers or creatives, we are mercenaries.